When Teddy Roosevelt was in office, he had the White House basement coated with mats. An avid martial artist, the 26th president wanted to be able to grapple and practice judo throws without leaving his home. Then the youngest man to assume the presidency (he was 42), he injected a certain vigor into the role: He invited accomplished boxers to the White House to spar with him, he led ambassadors on intense hikes, and he once livened up a formal luncheon by tossing a Swiss minister to the floor to demonstrate a judo hold. Thrice.

Roosevelt was the only martial artist to occupy the oval office, but his enthusiasm for exercise fits a pattern that’s become more marked among recent presidents. It’s not hard to see the appeal of an active president to constituents: Being the leader of the free world is a demanding job, and it’s comforting to know the person filling it will make it to the finish line. The same clearly holds for Supreme Court justices, as evidenced by widespread liberal concern about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s bone density and kale intake. (A recent article documenting the octogenarian’s workout regimen—a twice-weekly, hour-long circuit involving push-ups, planks, and weights—seems to have allayed some worries.)

Fear of death or disease aside, the president’s attitude toward his own health is important inasmuch as it can represent his deeper beliefs, which stand in for the values of the country as a whole. A commitment to working out suggests self-control, discipline, and a willingness to exert oneself in pursuit of a goal—ideas that align with the good old-fashioned American belief in meritocracy, however illusory.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, upon taking office, many recent presidents had special fitness-related requests and routines. Courted by two NFL teams while in college, Gerald Ford maintained his fitness in office with daily swims in the pool he had built on the White House grounds. A baseball player in his youth, George H.W. Bush dabbled in all kinds of sports as president, particularly running. Bill Clinton installed a jogging track on the South Lawn but preferred to run outside the White House gates, much to the chagrin of the Secret Service (admittedly, he ended more than one run at McDonald’s). George W. Bush liked mountain biking and was another avid runner, going so far as to put a treadmill on Air Force One so he’d never have to skip a workout.

Then there was Barack Obama, who started most days with a 45-minute weights-and-cardio session. In 2009, the 44th president had hoops and basketball lines added to the tennis court at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and regularly invited friends, and even former NBA players, to informal scrimmages. Exercise was not his only healthy habit. A famously disciplined eater, Obama managed to lose a few pounds while doing perhaps the world’s most demanding job. Whether he completely kicked a decades-long smoking habit has been debated, but he’s said to have transformed the health of others in the White House for the better, stocking the building with healthy food, encouraging staffers to participate in group fitness challenges, and offering the services of his own personal trainer.

Far from being insignificant activities squeezed into the cracks of their political lives, the sporting lives of past presidents have often been taken as symbols of their character and even their political beliefs. Roosevelt clearly practiced the “strenuous life” of “healthy combativeness” he preached in his speeches, and his willingness to enter a boxing ring was of a piece with the military preparedness he sought for America. George W. Bush talked about running in grand terms, encouraging others to sweat “for the good of their own health and for the good of the health of the nation.” Throughout Obama’s campaign, some argued that “the skinny kid with a funny name” used his love of basketball to counter claims that he was un-American. Others have compared Obama-the-basketball-player with Obama-the-politician: competitive, inclusive, pragmatic, likely to go left.

More recently, commentators have gone so far as to offer Obama’s physique as a symbol for the fitness of his administration—and Trump’s as its antithesis. A recent tweet placed pictures of the men side by side: To the left is a trim, shirtless Obama, his pecs glistening with sweat; to the right is a red-faced Trump, his gut testing the waistband of his golf slacks. The caption: “Obamacare vs. Trumpcare.”

Trump’s physical neglect is worlds away from the vigorous life led by Vladimir Putin, whose efforts to reassert Russia’s role as a muscular world power have involved the promotion of a literal strongman image. Widely circulated photos taken over the years show the leader partaking in many “manly" activities: horseback riding shirtless in the wilderness, doing the butterfly in a Siberian river, driving a Formula One race car, arm wrestling youths at a summer camp, and, more recently, pumping iron in a Sochi gym. He’s made no secret of the fact that he holds a black belt in judo, releasing a feature-length instructional DVD entitled Let’s Learn Judo With Vladimir Putin—which is worth a watch just to see an intent Putin warm up with some hip circles.

One might expect Trump’s “America First” approach to be accompanied by a similarly militaristic exercise regimen. Instead, the man who promises to make America great again publicly revels in his sedentariness and poor eating habits. Throughout his campaign, Trump was outspoken about his appreciation for fast food, tweeting pictures of himself downing burgers, a taco bowl, and fried chicken—the latter on his private plane, with a knife and fork, no less. Aside from some strenuous-looking handshakes, the only physical activity Trump appears to regularly engage in is golf. He once described giving speeches on the campaign trail as exercise. And back in 2015 he defended his inertness to the Times, saying “All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements—they’re a disaster” (which might not be far from the truth; now 70, Trump is the oldest person to assume the presidency).

These habits likely aren’t helped by the fact that he ends his evenings with “plenty of television” and very little sleep. All this marks an alarming shift from his active youth; while the baseball captain at New York Military Academy, Trump was reportedly scouted by the Phillies. The septuagenarian deserves some credit, though, for his rejection of alcohol and cigarettes.

Trump appears to assert his presidential fitness less by action than association. Over the years, he’s made his connections to renowned athletes widely known, on TV news and via Twitter. Throughout his campaign, Trump bragged about friendships with, and endorsements from, dominant—and often controversial—sporting stars, like former NBA player Dennis Rodman, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, and boxing heavyweight Mike Tyson.

Perhaps Trump’s most influential sporting connection is with World Wrestling Entertainment, the lucrative network on which wrestlers enact fictional storylines in staged fights. His relationship with the brand dates back some 30 years and has involved hosting events at his venues, appearing at promotions, and being inducted into the Hall of Fame. The company even infiltrated his cabinet, with former WWE CEO Linda McMahon now heading the Small Business Administration.

Much like reality TV, in the WWE—where the pins are planned and the pain is feigned—entertainment matters more than actuality. During the presidential campaign, Trump applied this idea outside the ring, diverting attention about his questionable health by belatedly revealing his medical results on an episode of Dr. Oz. Not long after, he released a superlative-ridden letter from his physician claiming his blood pressure and lab results were “astonishingly excellent” and that his medical exam showed “only positive results”—even though his BMI indicated he was clinically overweight. (His physician later admitted to writing the letter in five minutes and suggested that his overwrought language was influenced by Trump’s own rhetoric, which spawned another round of chatter and media coverage).

When it comes to his health, and so much else, Trump seems less interested in the truth than his ability to spread his own narrative. As a Time interviewer aptly summarized during a recent chat with the president: “Whatever the reality of what you are describing, the fact that [the facts] are disputed makes them a more effective message, that you are able to spread the message further, that more people get excited about it, that it gets on TV.” After all, what would be the point of actually working out when he can be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” and capture America’s attention, without ever stepping foot in a gym?

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that proceeded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.

The president sent a terse note to North Korea’s leader, citing “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

It was going to be the first meeting between an American president and a North Korean leader in history—an audacious effort to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. But on Thursday—after days of bitter back-and-forth between the United States and North Korea over how to approach denuclearization, with a North Korean official threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” with the U.S. even as the North Korean government destroyed a nuclear test site as a show of good faith—the White House abruptly announced that the June 12 summit in Singapore would not take place.

The news came in a letter from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un, the full text of which is here:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.